I simply haven’t been able to get this article out of my mind: The Fashion Industry doesn’t even care about Fashion anymore. If you read one article this week or month, let it be this one. First I reposted it to The Fashion Crowd FB page. Then I reposted it on LinkedIn, and then to the intranet with my MA class from Academy Of Arts University, but I still feel I’m not done with it. The title says it all; The Fashion Industry doesn’t even care about Fashion anymore. It’s a very strong statement and rather negative too. Is fashion dead? Let’s explore. All the people I know in fashion are utterly passionate about it. Otherwise they simply wouldn’t be there, as it isn’t worth it. Too much hassle. It’s people who dream about fashion, spend their Friday nights on Pinterest, and who will consider their wardrobe more of an archive. So, in my humble opinion, it’s not the fashion professionals, who don’t care. Indeed we – as in a broader range of people in …

The great thing about having a space called ‘Fashion Fun’ is that you can do what you want. It’s a bit like research really, where you intuitively go with images that excite you – just because they excite you. There’s something wonderfully free and almost rebellious about it. Complete anarchy. And this is important in fashion design, where you have to trust your gut feeling, and where you can convince people of anything, if you’re convinced yourself. So I decided to post a cat. A Cover Cat. For some reason I got excited about this. I just love how it looks straight at the camera. And I love the type of sunglasses too. You can really feel how it belongs in the world of fashion; Le Chat front row. But why am I actually posting this? Because I’m having fun while checking out fashionable cats on the net, and I’m trying to remind myself and others that fashion should be fun, at least it can be. It’s often very serious too, and pretentious, but it …

It’s 2017 – exciting, isn’t it? At The Fashion Crowd, we took a break in order to strategize for 2017, and now we’re back with exciting plans and a desire to make 2017 a fashionable one. Over the past days, we stumbled upon a couple of articles that made our minds fly. The first was from Vogue (read it here), and it spoke about the amount of changes that happened in 2016, and that are likely to keep happening in 2017. That is one thing that is certain and the over-all question remains how fashion can keep up with the pace of social media and its instant changes, its very reason to exist. Perhaps in the future, the new normal will be that we will all only have a basic wardrobe and merely rent the fashion pieces in order to always be able to change them? Joseph & Oscar de la Rente… Let’s see. Surely it’s exiting and opens up to a well of new possibilities. The article went on to talking about the main …

So, we’re not exactly a political blog as in at all – we’re a fashion blog – but fashion is about making a standpoint that you believe in, and so is being a cool human being. We had to comment on the one thing that is on our mind today; the US election. We don’t consider ourselves to be experts in American politics, and therefore perhaps our voice is not even important, but we do consider ourselves to have certain values that we believe in, and human traits that we approve of and admire. Let’s start with the human traits; I really admire, when people work hard, have a proven track record/CV, know what they’re talking about, have familiarised themselves with cases they comment on, speak well of others, and have a positive outlook on the future and believe in being able to better things. This is the type of person, I would love to be friends with and hire to work with. It’s also the type of person I would go to great lengths …

Last month, we started our Monthly Fashion Fun with a fashion quiz of illustrated runway looks from ss17 that we posted on Instagram. It was such a big success – and so much fun – that we have decided to carry on with the concept of monthly projects. They will be outlets of pure creativity, and though it’s not directly connected to creating a fashion collection or trend forecasting (our main focuses in here), it’s still a very good way to exercise the creative muscles. Understanding and mastering fashion in a broader sense than just creating clothes and accessories is very helpful and also necessary today. November’s Fashion Fun will be Fashion Emojis, as everyone loves emojis, as a fresh way of brighten up any text message and making the meaning clearer – with the use of a little, yellow fellow with dark sunglasses, for instance (my personal favourite). But hey; I also do love sunglasses! I’m so Karl 🙂 We have only just done our first entry, as this is still early November, but …

The Creative Director is the one, who determines what a fashion collection should look like – gives the creative direction – and has the last word when it comes to the creative part. Lately, there have been many changes; to mention a few Justin O’Shea left Brioni, Peter Dundas left Emilio Pucci, Anthony Vaccarello recently showed his debut collection at YSL and Maria Grazia Chiuri showed hers at Maison Dior. But what is the role of Creative Directors, actually, anno 2016, where historic and eponymous fashion brands have outlived the founding fashion designer? So, Anthony Vacarello recently mentioned in an interview that to him, YSL is not about the actual clothes but about an attitude. Or to quote the designer himself “My idea of YSL lies in the attitude”. When he met with Mr Pierre Berger, Berger confirmed Vacarello in not trying to copy Monsieur Saint Laurent, as such an attempt can never be original, contemporary and perhaps successful. With that in mind, we’re looking at a fashion brand, where the actual brand has outlived …

With the fashion weeks ss17 well behind, it’s now time to decipher what the strongest messages are, and what the key fashion trends ss17 will be. As we always do, we started out with collecting images and looks that inspired us on our Pinterest boards divided by cities, and they’re a great help in quickly finding the strongest images and being reminded of the various designer collections. When we speak about fashion trends for a given season – and in this case fashion trends ss17 – there’s a difference between the trends that will be really successful with the buyers and customers and shape, what we will see in the shops and streets in six months time, and then the trends, little signals (which we have on previous occasions called ‘sparkling stars’), that will somehow influence the following fashion season aw17/18. It’s essentially a question of understanding where a given trend is on the trend curve; incoming, peaking, outgoing. Fast Fashion brands will look at peaking and do ‘what is hot’ for the season. Pret-a-Porter …

The recent Christian Dior collection ss17 – with the newly appointed Creative Director Maria Grazia Chiuri – were not only beautiful looks from one of the world’s most renowned fashion brands; there was also an important message among of fashionable feminism. While the word ‘feminism’ was first coined some 150 years ago, the battle has continues since then, but with women having achieved, if not all then at least many of the same rights as men, at least in the modern Western world, the word has somehow lost its appeal. While it essentially means ‘equal rights’ (and who can not agree to that?), it’s almost as there’s something too hippie and carnal about the word that doesn’t go well with our polished world, where things look best when having been given a filter and are being observed on the latest smart phone at a safe distance. The bra says it all. We all wear it; young girls to elderly women regardless of nationality, age and social status – everywhere. It’s a reaction to the more …

Fashion is fickle – no doubt about that! It’s only two days ago that I made a point about how a fashion collection must have a strong and novel silhouette in order to be exciting (read more about that here) that I find myself falling in love with collections with a minimal silhouette that is very straightforward. So how can that be? Because in fashion there really aren’t any rules, and in the minute you give a guideline of how to make something work, it’s proven that it can be done otherwise. It’s anything but German grammar, where a rule is a rule – no exception. In fashion sometimes it just works, because… yeah, well, it just works. This can make fashion hard to teach, and it can make it hard to comprehend for outsiders. That’s probably also one of the reasons, why a fashion designer’s finest asset is his or her ability to see the world in a unique way and trust ones own intuition. A couple of days ago, I got really excited …